Rob
Sherman Advocacy
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Rob
Sherman Advocacy
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"Fighting injustice, one victory at a time."
A federal judge in Los Angeles has stopped the .biz domain name lottery scam.
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As first reported here in the June 21st edition of Liberal News and Commentary, NeuLevel, the company which is authorized to dole out .biz domain names decided that they could make a financial killing by running a private lottery for .biz domain names. If you wanted a particular .biz name, you would have to enter a lottery for five dollars. However, NeuLevel established a rule whereby the same party could buy, and was strongly encouraged to buy, more than one chance for a .biz name in the registrar company's illegal private lottery. This would have created a windfall of illegal profits for the private company, because the same "merchandise," which should have been distributed at no charge, was being sold at five dollars per chance, with no limit to how many chances could be sold per name.
The problems with that system were numerous.
First of all, private lotteries are illegal, specifically for the purpose of preventing a company from profiteering off of a shortage.
Secondly, according to NeuLevel, 80% of the domain names were requested by only one party. That means that the one party might have been bidding against himself, sending in hundreds or thousands of dollars when five dollars would have purchased the exact same thing.
Thirdly, NeuLevel was only given authority to register successful applicants. Their lottery system, however, put NeuLevel in a position of effectively owning all .biz domain names, and offering every .biz name for sale at an auction. The more desirable the name, the higher the auction price in the form of lottery chances sold.
NeuLevel has no right to sell .biz names for the highest possible profit by instituting a private lottery. They don't own those names. They are only authorized to register one applicant per name for the cost of conducting a registration process. By auction off the names in a lottery and keeping the profits, NeuLevel has illegally converted their registrar authority into false ownership of all .biz domain names.
NeuLevel is not entitled to obtain a windfall profit by exerting effective ownership of all .biz names and then keeping the profits that accrue from selling the names in an illegal private lottery.
In my campaign to stop NeuLevel's .biz lottery and as reported in the June 22nd edition of Liberal News & Commentary, I contacted the United States Attorney in Chicago, which is the local office of the United States Attorney General. That office declined to take action against NeuLevel. They referred my objections to the FBI, but the FBI never contacted me about the subject.
When the government refused to step in, I contacted CNN to see if they could put the heat from the spotlight of publicity. They did. They interviewed me and ran that interview as the top story on the August 4th edition of their CNNdotCOM show. Now, two months later, a judge has issued a temporary injunction which blocked the lottery from taking place. A permanent injunction is anticipated, shortly.
Here is a link to a CNN story about yesterday's court decision.
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